Here is a real quote from a Canadian SVP with a brand that you know … “We are not adopting social media and if we were, that decision would be made in the U.S.” Remarkably this comment was made in an email on an introduction thread initiated by an influential who is well connected to journalists.
What insights does this contain?
The SVP has no fear that the comment will reflect their lack of initiative, their knowledge, their lack of responsibility for the Canadian market - they perceive no threat. Even if they think social media doesn’t matter and/or are sick of getting too many introductions to talk about social media … why put a comment like this in an easy to spread email to a hack & an entrepreneur who are both bloggers?
Perhaps some demographics at work in Canada that heighten the new digital divide? Clearly there are very tightly bound social networks in pockets across Canada that make this guy feel safe and can stifle innovation. Even at this moment I am protecting the identity of this dude. I would never steer an email into the wild or leak something. That is how I roll, but I don’t think this exec is relying on my ethics.
Does the recession have something to do with it? Americans’ more pronounced recession is forcing them to take risks with social media and they are finding that it is cost effective? I don’t think so.
Does this reflect culture? We are spending billions to cope with the recession & the most imagination that we can show is digging ditches building “infrastructure” & spending $1.4 million per job to save GM.
I agree with Andrew Jenkins - Social media is being completely integrated into marketing. Marketing is being completely re-architected because of social media.
Brian Moffat’s comment is on to something when he says corporate social media needs to be removed from the hands of marketers in Canada. I think that will depend on how we sell social media.
But Mark is right - Canadians welding power at the moment both corporately and in government are not leading or even fast following.
Our SVP working for a big American brand is not really the problem. 95% of the Canadian economy is driven by small business that has difficulty adopting to radical change like we have witnessed since broadband over took slower connections in 2004. That is the bigger issue.
How about a government tax break aimed at helping these businesses adapt and scale to the global opportunity instead of encouraging me to use my own money to paint my house?
From about the 3:38 point in the video to 7:30 Barabási and Fowler have a focused discussion on the differences between social & tech networks and the role of natural selection in the formation & structure of social networks.
These are four highly recommended minutes for anyone working towards the understanding of memetic brand.
Hat tip to Valdis Krebs for sharing this item and these related links:
Pointing out a memetic trigger like a “violation of viewing habits” is valuable to this idea of memetic brand building.
But check out this, perhaps more complex example, of twitter being at the heart of the development of shared perception. Click here to see the whole discussion.
1. Their Twitter use made their interests and expertise findable so that they could quickly and easily explore the idea together.
2. Twitter made their exchange findable by others, who could quickly add to the development of the idea or at least follow their thinking.
3. Many who were not trying to find the related discussion have been “infected” with the thinking because they are followers of the users involved in the exchange. In this case, that may have added up to thousands, with little or no effort on behalf of the original thinkers. Even though these two users are working at the genesis of an idea, they are thought leaders.
Whether observers accept or reject their thinking is one thing. The cool point is that they don’t have to go through that thinking learning curve in the same way for themselves. They have a memetic blueprint to work forward with.
I think there are many productivity breakthroughs to explore along these lines that we are only beginning to see the potential of.
I would be interested in hearing thoughts on why Twitter seems more exciting and/or useful than forums? Forums also enable people to find topics and related discussions but they always frustrate the hell out of me. I expect to find what I am looking for, but never can.
Maybe it is because on Twitter, I find what I am not looking for and it is related discussion?
Now that I have used Twitter for a while, I am more convinced than when I started that it is an example, along with activity feeds & other microblogging platforms, of a new medium that is particularly suited for memetic branding purposes. It is involved in the genesis of shared perception.
Picked up on twitter …
MarkusvonRoder: Demonstrating the memetic trigger “Violation of viewing habits” - the Escalopter (escalator + helicopter)
Update:
I have turned my evolving reflections about twitter into a series of posts. Catch the other thoughts:
In prep for leading the Social Marketing round table at last week’s Canadian Marketing Association Digital Marketing Conference I asked “What are the top three topics of discussion in social media today?” on Twitter and LinkedIn.
I received about 35 responses within a few days, with over 85 references to topics. Over 30 responses came from LinkedIn within 24 hours from all over the USA. The main issues were reflected as we went around the table at the conference.
Keep in mind that the folks on Twitter & tuned into LinkedIn answers are probably a little further along the adoption curve wrt social marketing than most.
In theory they might have blinders on … be more optimistic about how far along in adoption we are wrt to social media.
However, I think the responses indicates that it is still early days. There were 23 references to obtaining internal buy-in for the adoption of social marketing and almost as many (21) for demonstrating ROI and measurement. Aren’t these really the same thing? All about getting the folks at the top to see the value proposition.
We have moved beyond the early innovators. That is good news. But we are still a bunch of early adoptors trying to make the case to the early majority.
If you are responsible for or are adding a great example to the list and you and/or your client would like me to include fuller case studies of the example in some of my future publications, please get in touch.
Here is a replica of the list at October 14, 2008:
>> Last update: 8 October 2008
>> Total brands: 239
Examples of companies using and being used by social media marketing:
3 Italia. Social networks: Facebook Business and La3 DVB-H groups.80
Brand Monitoring: Uses conversation monitoring from Visible Technologies.
Crowdsourcing: Ideastorm allows users to suggest and vote on ideas, has generated 9,800+ ideas. Employee storm, internal idea community has generated over 2,700 ideas.3
Microblogging: 22 corporate accounts on Twitter, as well as 17+ individuals using “[Name]AtDell” handles
I picked up a hard copy of the March 2008 New York Time Magazine at my sister’s place on the west coast at the beginning of August. At various times it has been on the floor of my rental car, on the beach, in a hotel room in Chicago, in the pile to go out for recycling, in the rack in the bathroom and sitting on the corner of my desk (is that more information than you need to know?).
The serious effects that the addition of Sarah Palin to the equation is having in US politics reminds me … I have been carting this around because I have been meaning to blog about a one page article in it by Farhad Manjoo called Rumor’s Reason.
In the article Farhad traces the Obama as “Muslim Manchurian candidate” idea back to a summer 2004 press release by Andy Martin. With no factual proof, the story was ignored by the ”objective” traditional media at first. But the idea that Obama is Muslim persisted, showing up on the net, breaking through to broadcast media from time to time, to the point where one poll showed 8% believing it.
Farhad goes on to report on the social psychology of why a blatantly false idea can persist. He highlights “how our brains suss out truth from fiction. To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it. But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea. You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.”
Understanding these structural factors behind why an idea is accepted and spreads is what we are trying to do at www.memeticbrand.com. The cognitive factors covered by Farhad are only part of the story.
These structural factors are often behind overall or turning point dynamics of modern elections. They matter and they mean that democracy is at work, long before the day comes for you to cast your ballot. Your contribution to online forums, blogs and the like help charge real world social networks with scales of implicit content not previously achievable.
“Objective” mainstream media don’t rely on releases from campaigns or blog posts from so-called “influentials”, they use a rule of thumb: if a story “breaks” away from the implicit content milieu it must be a story worth reporting, it has “legs”.
The Pew study tracked the spread of eight ideas during the 2004 election. Each one of them, in a different context, could have triggered a change of momentum in another election.
The point is that in the relatively new context where online media has become a fully integrated component of the national discourse, most of those eight ideas were neutralized by competing voices before they spread far enough to change the course of the election. They remained in the milieu.
The way people use broadband internet takes the milieu out of the cognitive and limited physical word of mouth space and brings it forth as our most intense form of media, incorporating word of mouth, text, audio, photographs and video.
Ideas “break” when they mutate. “Obama is a muslum” became an email over the course of two years. Farhad notes that one version of the email contains a line, “I checked this out on Snopes (a fact checking website), and it’s true”.
I can tell you one thing. I would have written this blog post a lot sooner if a friend had sent me Farhad’s piece electronically instead of it being stuck on a bit of dead tree, kicking around in meatspace. Heck, maybe folks will even stick around long enough to figure out the new spin-doctors’ talents if we que this piece up with something hilarious!
“Obama offered a clear, point-by-point rebuttal to every argument in the chain e-mail, and he provided an important alternative story - “dirty tricks”. His single voice and one counter story did not kill the story. To neutralize a negative idea about your brand you need what Seth Godin refers to as a Tribe. Endless volunteers, amplifying your voice. Getting your messages out through mutations and offerring the right alternative story to the right audience at the right time. There are also underlying structural factors that you need to take under management. Both are involved in memetic brand management. Traditional central campaign methods are not designed for this.
It was not until 2004 that broadband internet overtook dialup connections, and the correlating behaviour of people and network effects entirely changed the game.
The spin doctors’ craft has traditionally been more creative than calculation. In 2003, there was a moment during an Ontario provincial election campaign when the ruling conservative party issued a press release calling the liberal opponent an “evil, reptilian kitten-eater from another planet“. Many commentators at the time believed that the resulting turn in fortunes against the conservatives was due to voter resentment of negative campaigning. I speculate that the combination of environmental cues that existed had created for voters uncertainty about the liberal leaders’ leadership qualities. The kitten-eater moment, filled the void with a tough, vivid image that finally materialized the liberal leader as a force to be reckoned with.
Over the last six months I have seen demonstrations of real time online social media monitoring systems that dramatically reduce the guesswork involved in exploring what key concepts are churning in the milieu of implicit content.
Investing in this kind of know how. Securing corporate reputations in this context. Making the corporation more accountable to social forces and society more aware of corporate capabilities is the motive here.
Now let’s test those key words again … “hockey mom”, “ordinary American”, “small town”, “Washington outsider”, “beauty queen” … truth.
Check out this post by Collin please. You should do this because he is a great guy and his sister is doing something cool.
From a memetic branding stand point, you might want to think about how altruism is important to everthing that you do in this new era that we live in.
“Economic theory suggests at least three mechanisms which induce the decision-maker to treat the partner more generously when there is a prospect of future interaction. First, the decision-maker can grant favors because she expects the partner to repay these in the future (enforced reciprocity)… Second, the possibility of future interaction gives incentives for the decision-maker to signal her altruistic type to the partner (Benabou and Tirole 2006). Third, psychological game theory has modeled preference-based reciprocity where decision-makers behave generously because they expect the partner to behave kindly towards them in some future interaction, and because they derive utility from rewarding kind behavior (Rabin 1993, Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger 2004)” (Leider, Stephen, Mobius, Markus, Rosenblat, Tanya and Do, Quoc-Anh, “How Much is a Friend Worth? Directed Altruism and Enforced Reciprocity in Social Networks” p.1, October 2007)
The definition of social surplus that most “iPod killer” strategies employ is greater “utility.” They seek to beat iPod by building a better mousetrap with better product features and better design. Rebate strategies and typical loyalty programs (earning points for rewards) are also widely tried methods.
It is a social surplus defined as greater signal of altruistic type that may be the most interesting to study further as the link between social capital and corporate earnings comes to be accepted. There is some evidence that social Causes are the kind of maxim behind which business may align their activities as they develop memetic brands. For example just the top 5 causes on the Causes application on Facebook reach about 7.5 million people.
It brings with it the possibility of new motives for corporate social responsibility. Not only will the corporation be asked to be more accountable for its actions, perhaps the corporation can be encouraged to invest in ways for its social connections – consumers, suppliers, employees, investors, owners, analysts and value added resellers – to move beyond feel-good CSR tactics towards a relationship in which the opportunity is seized by each forging identities based upon greater social contribution.
A few memetic brand reflections that occur while watching this Susan Blackmore TED talk:
- good introduction to the foundations of memetics,
- we are the meme machines,
- what are the keys to selection? Variation is a key to selection. Mutation/variation is key to the survival and the spread of an idea, key to memetic branding but contradicts the traditional brand mantras of consistency, continuity and conformity … hmm,
- “don’t think intelligence”, “think replicators” … this would seem to point us as brand strategists, towards investing a lot more time and money on understanding and developing relationships with broadband empowered uploaders, we over invest in campaign creative and broadcast “push” because it is easier,
- “spreading memes is dangerous” but economic network theory (UPDATE: Just came across this related paper: http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/2756, it’s new!) makes us hopeful that not only will we observe and replicate the behavour of our neighbors, there will be sufficient optimism to spur experiments, so that we will settle on optimum behaviours … hope matters. Elections like this one in the USA, matter …
Launch the video and please jot down your thoughts as they occur below …
That’s my twitter handle. Despite the technical problems that Twitter has been having, I finally took the plunge at MESH08. I promised to monitor the “back channel” for a few of the panelists on www.twemes.com and I just could not stand being a fly on the wall any longer.
I must say that being live in one session and monitoring the tweets from two other sessions brought an incredible FULL ON level of engagement that I could not image before Twitter and Twemes.
But my main motive for joining Twitter is not to monitor back channel. My real reason is that I want to tell you all about what I ate for dinner - NOT.
My real reason is because I definitely think that it is a new medium that is particularly suited for memetic branding purposes.
Firstly, there is still a relatively small group of people on twitter (even less following me!). They are the early adoptors and in most cases, they publish blogs and other web content, so they are endowed with scaled up forms of social capital.
Perhaps more importantly, I think Twitter is a medium that is involved in the genesis of shared perception. From a memetic branding stand point, that is worth exploring.
Finally, over the years I have lived in different parts of Asia, Europe and North America. My personal network is stretched by time and geography. So far, only a few of my contacts are on Twitter, but I can really see how this is going to make the value of these global relationships present in each moment, in a much more tangible and immediate way.
I can only describe my initial impressions of Twitter as - prescience.
15hrs ago - “I am brushing my teeth”. Can’t you see the potential!
Update:
I have turned my evolving reflections about twitter into a series of posts. Catch the other thoughts:
